Today we face a climate of ever increasing misdirection by popular media. This site, along with others, aims to reveal the reality of America and the loss of fact inherent to the over riding theme of our current political and social confusion: Purposeful deception.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Occupy Wall Street: Police Violence Reveals A Corrupt System

At four in the morning in
lower Manhattan,
as what remains of theOccupy Wall Street encampment
is loaded into trash compacters, some protesters have still not given up on the
police. Kevin Sheneberger tries to engage one NYPD officer in a serious debate
about the role of law enforcement in public protest. Then he sees them loading
his friend's tent into the back of a rubbish truck. Behind him, a teenage girl
holds a hastily written sign saying: "NYPD, we trusted you – you were
supposed to protect us!"

The sentiment is a familiar
one. Across Europe, over a year of
demonstrations, occupations and civil disobedience, anti-austerity protesters
have largely shifted from declaring solidarity with the police – as fellow
workers whose jobs and pensions are also under threat – to outrage and anger at
state violence against unarmed protesters. Following last
month's police brutality in Oakland, and today's summary
eviction of the Occupy Wall Street camp, American activists too are
reaching the conclusion that "police protect the 1%".

The notion that law
enforcement is there to protect a wealthy elite from the rest of the population
is not news to those protesters from deprived and ethnic minority backgrounds,
many of whom have been subject to intimidation in their communities for years,
but for those from more privileged backgrounds, the first spurt of pepper spray
to the face is an important education in the nature of the relationship between
state and citizen in the west. "Who do you guys work for?" Shouts one
Manhattan
protester, as police load arrestees into a van. "You work for JP Morgan
Bank!"

In times of economic and
democratic crisis, it makes sense for faltering governments to use police
violence and the threat of arrest to bully citizens into compliance. In the
context of protest, however, police harassment has three other, important
effects. The first and most important of these is consciousness-raising.

The spectacle of police
beating and brutalising unarmed civilians for the crime of sitting on the
pavement and demanding a fairer world brings home the point of the struggle to
public and protesters alike. The second is galvanising: attacks on peaceful
protesters rarely make the police or government look anything but weak and
cowardly, and have tended only to increase public support for civil
disobedience. "This is going to explode now," 26-year-old Katie tells
me, as we watch demonstrators marched out of ZuccottiPark
one by one. "They don't realise what they've done."

Fighting the police can
focus the energy of a movement – but it can also drain that energy. In Britain, a year
of arrests and vicious crackdowns have left anti-cuts protesters debilitated
and depleted, and the challenge for the American movement will be to remember
its purpose in the face of police brutality. "That's the whole point of
violent resistance," says Sheneberger. "It exposes the corruption of
the power that's resisting you."

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